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At the AGO, a river that flows, finally, in multiple directions

Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries taps into rich wells of material outside the city’s more official art history

Wanda Nanibush, the AGO's curator of Canadian and indigenous art, with Jeff Thomas's "Portrait of Bear" (1984) at the gallery's Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries. The gallery has been mulling the Toronto show for at least a dozen years and when Nanibush took the reigns, she steered it into unexpected territory. (Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star)

June Clark, Formative Triptych, 1989. Despite success elsewhere, Clark has never been part of the AGO's collection, a fact its current Trubutes + Tributaries hopes to change with a fresh take on the city's art history. (Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star)

Rebecca Belmore's Rising to the Occasion, a Victorian gown fitted with a beaver dam bustle that the legendary Anishinaabe artist wore on the streets of Thunder Bay while Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson visited nearby. Part of Tributes + Tributaries, a fresh take on Toronto art history from the AGO.
(Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star)

Jameilie Hassan's Vitrine 448,1987, is critical of the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss as colonial and reductive. It's part of the AGO's broad-ranging Toronto art history survey, Tributes + Tributaries. (Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star)

Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge's Art Is Political. Created for their 1976 survey at the AGO. The work, seen at the time as too political for the museum, has been buried in the archive and not seen since. Its resurfacing here represents the museum's willingness to accept a more complicated past.
(Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star)

History, the old truism goes, belongs to the winners, and a more ugly and dismissive credo you’ll never find. It’s also, sadly, mostly accurate, and the task of shading the past from black and white to the more fitting spectrum of grey is as herculean a one as you’ll encounter.

So this month, the Art Gallery of Ontario gets at the very least an “A” for just that effort. Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, its highly subjective new take on Toronto artmaking between 1971 and 1989, adds to the city’s already complicated history a breadth of revelation and surprise.

It’s notable for all kinds of reasons but, for the first time I can think of in such omnibus endeavours, it’s remarkable more for who it takes in than who it leaves out.

That’s one way to put it. Nanibush, who is Anishinaabe from the Beausoleil First Nation near Penetanguishene, brings to the museum a fresh perspective about victors and vanquished, to be sure.

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To put a fine point on it, Tributes + Tributaries opens with a bang: a towering photo-portrait of Bear, son of First Nations artist Jeff Thomas, from 1984 against the crumbling brick of a downtown-Toronto streetscape. It sends a signal: historically, the city is where colonial reality begins, but it’s also where theirs, as free indigenous people, ends.

The AGO has been kicking around a Toronto show for at least a dozen years, and the reticence is easy to understand. With its fractured scenes and multiple histories, a show under the broad rubric of “Toronto” is sure to offend someone, somewhere, somehow.

Add that the gallery has always suffered an insecurity crisis, quietly believing, in that very Toronto way, that being in Toronto was the only thing preventing it from being “world class,” and the perfect storm starts building. A Toronto show has always embodied its worst crisis of confidence: Surely it would drag it down to provincial-seeming regionalism, wouldn’t it? And anyway, isn’t it good enough we have dozens of works by General Idea and Michael Snow?

Things, thankfully, change and when Andrew Hunter, the gallery’s curator of Canadian art, arrived in 2013, the long-gestating Toronto show began to evolve into something less feared as narrowly tokenistic and seen more as a critical foundation for the museum’s mission of recording the city’s cultural history.

But there’s that word again, and which history, exactly, became the chore of Nanibush to determine. To be clear: Tributes + Tributaries doesn’t try to be a completist view so much as it brings stories long relegated to the sidelines into the main and lets them stand on their own.

Among the 60-plus artists here, Nanibush includes more than a dozen indigenous artists, declaring a priority about the politics of inclusion and inserting a much-needed chapter into the art history book of a city long on academic conceptualism as a ruling ethic.

But that’s just one aspect of a more clearly articulated desire to make corrections and footnotes across the board. Nanibush digs deep into the city’s history of diversity and activism running parallel to the art scenes of the period, weaving a whole skein of difference into Toronto’s master narrative of conceptualism, image-making and performance.

Nanibush’s temporal bookends are clear: from 1971’s Miss General Idea Pageant at the Art Gallery of Ontario – Toronto conceptualism’s public coming-out party – to legendary Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s Rising to the Occasion (1987-91), a stylized crinoline gown with a beaver-dam bustle fashioned of dense twigs. It sits opposite the dress used for the Pageant, an artifact of the high-concept oeuvre of the city’s most likely art-world brand-bearers, General Idea, and between them lies a world of difference.

Canny satirists of a burgeoning mass media universe, General Idea built their fame on a gleeful critique of the mechanics of fame. Belmore arrived with a critique both more urgent and less heeded: An anti-colonial satire perfectly played, she paraded the dress in the streets of Thunder Bay in 1987, a tangle of monarchist tchotchke caught in the twigs, as the royal visit of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson took place just blocks away.

Points and counterpoints abound: Michael Snow, the only artist from here who might surpass General Idea in notoriety and global impact, shares a small space with natural confreres Robin Collyer and Robert Fones. Along with them is a notable first-timer: June Clark, an African-Canadian artist and long-time Torontonian, has never once shown in the AGO, despite a fruitful career in places like New York and in Ottawa, where she’s included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

It can’t have to do with the work: Clark’s Formative Triptych, from 1989, holds its ground and then some. Archival images of black girls and women glow on lightboxes next to less-than-aphoristic text: “I remember the day that, with the dictionary, Valerie taught me the word n----- — ‘So that if anyone ever calls you that . . . ’”

It feels fresh, urgent and, sadly, timely, which it surely was when it was made. For a city that has ever prided itself on diversity, peaceability and tolerance, it didn’t fit the story we like to tell about ourselves. Things are never so tidy, then or now, however much our polite institutional history might indicate (ask the Royal Ontario Museum about that). In the here and now, Clark has never been collected by the AGO, a fact Nanibush is looking to fix.

Tributes + Tributaries, in classic museum-exhibition fashion, is compartmentalized into categories, the better to teach an unfamiliar subject to an unknowing audience. For artists like Clark or Thomas, and so many others here, that’s a fair stance. Nanibush is doing nothing so much as reintroducing an official history that shares equal billing with its traditional footnotes, and she muddies the resolved clarity of so many decades’ thought in badly needed ways.

It’s a worthy, necessary project and, inevitably, it tries to do too much. Lovely moments are at times hampered by dutiful inclusions.

Nearby, though, John Massey’s Versailles, a solo, oblique nod to the era’s vibrant queer scene, seems lonely and isolated on a small stretch of wall, while a bright pink bicycle painting by Greg Curnoe, a titan to be sure, leans in a passageway. It’s far from his best work, and a non-sequitur here among the welter of identity politics that makes the show’s meat.

But in the widening of an entire official point of view, those are small complaints. When you see Tributes + Tributaries, you catch glimpses of a Toronto long past that you never knew existed. That’s the museum’s fault, as much as anyone’s, but finally it’s making up for lost time.

Toronto: Trubutes + Tributaries continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario to May 2017, with works from the collection rotating in and out in the new year. See ago.net for information.

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